The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Datacenter management encompasses monitoring and support of datacenter performance, inventory management, network access, and ensuring network traffic is efficiently flowing. Datacenters may include internetworking devices such as routers, switches, and firewalls, as well as service devices such as application servers, storage servers, server consoles, network cables, and power cables. Inventory management may include monitoring device capacity, device health, such as the power and temperature levels of a particular server, as well as ensuring that data traffic is efficiently flowing from one point to another. Performance management may include monitoring latency thresholds, packet throughput, and response times.
As part of datacenter management, field engineers have access to discrete data repositories to troubleshoot datacenter issues. Network topology maps are used to keep an inventory of where devices are located within the datacenter. Topology maps along with access to data repositories are used to troubleshoot and repair faults within the datacenter. However, a challenge of datacenter management involves how to rapidly obtain network management data, such as flow statistics, from a particular network device of interest. Datacenters often are constructed using densely configured racks of routers, switches, and other computers, so finding a device of interest and obtaining network management data just from that device can be a considerable challenge in a large, dense datacenter.